I’ve previously confessed that as a teenager I used to read the dictionary for pleasure; that learning new words gave me a sense of intellectual armament. In my adult life, I’ve noticed I have a tendency to unpick the antecedents of words in a fashion that regular people and even most writers probably don’t. It’s just what my brain does.
It's happened dozens of times over the years, but the most recent example began with the word ruthless. It occurred to me that if a person was ruthless, then presumably once upon a time ‘ruth’ had to be a word. And given that it was a word people saw fit to repurpose as a woman’s name, it must have been a nice word. The opposite of ‘ruthless’, I thought, was ‘merciful’. So presumably ‘ruth’ was once a synonym for ‘mercy’.
I was pretty close – according to the online Oxford dictionary, ruth was ‘a feeling of pity, distress or grief’.
While the English language can sometimes seem complex, even scatterbrained , when you apply the formulae of grammar and lexicography it develops an almost mathematical simplicity – like dividing something down to a prime number.
Anything with a suffix – such as ‘-less’ in the above example – will usually lead back to a root word. I suspect the person who drew me to this revelation was Stephen King. In Danse Macabre, he used the word ‘grue’ (which Microsoft Word doesn’t recognise, just as it doesn’t recognise ruth with a lowercase ‘R’), presumably because in a 350-page book about horror, one eventually runs out of worthwhile synonyms for blood and guts. ‘Grue’, of course, is the root word for ‘gruesome’, still in common use today.
Like an optical illusion, once you see this pattern, it can’t be unseen. Take ‘cumbersome’. Remove the suffix and it leaves ‘cumber’, which means ‘hindrance, obstruction or burden’. Microsoft Word doesn’t put a squiggly red line under ‘cumber’, likely because it remained in common use more recently than ‘ruth’ or ‘grue’.
Try this yourself. If you’re a word nerd you’ll find it’s tremendous fun, like unearthing the secret history of English.